Last weekend, I snuck away with a group of my closest college girlfriends. We escaped to an artsy cabin overlooking a lake in the Hudson Valley, complete with a sauna and dreamy views in every direction. We meditated. We cooked. We drank orange wine. We laughed.
And we talked a lot.
About politics, parenting, aging, the state of the world. But one theme kept bubbling up, something that seems to be surfacing in a lot of conversations lately, both offline and on, and that is the internet itself. Not just how much time we spend on it, but the way it’s shaping everything around us, our identity, loneliness, climate change, culture wars, social connection, and our kids’ lives.
There’s been a flurry of essays and podcasts lately on the rise of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) from Ezra Klein’s interview last week with Jenny Anderson the author of the Disengaged Teen, to the Times coverage of whistleblowers leaving OpenAI over safety concerns. These are crucial conversations, but they sort of feel… abstract. Massive. Above our pay grade. And while the scope of it all feels far beyond what any of us regular people can influence, the truth is, this isn’t a “future” problem. We’re already in it right now. The internet is shaping us whether we’re ready or not.
For those of you who found me on TikTok and followed me here, you probably know me as the Southern girl who talks about design, style, and progressive politics. And you might be wondering why I’m suddenly veering into tech. Which is fair. What many people don’t know is that I’ve spent the better part of my professional career working in the tech world. I don’t chat about it much online but as a result, tech is something I think about a lot.
So no, this isn’t going to be a deep dive into whether it’s “speciesist” for humans to want to stay in control of artificial intelligence (yes, that’s an actual debate happening in some corners). But I do think it’s worth naming what feels obvious and yet doesn’t get talked about with enough urgency. The people running the internet are the ones shaping our reality. And if our government doesn’t intervene, a handful of billionaire tech CEOs will continue to operate unchecked.
This isn’t just a parenting issue. It’s not just about screen time or distracted teens. The lack of regulation hits the most vulnerable communities first and hardest (especially in the South) where access is delayed and harmful effects are accelerated.
So yes, I think this conversation belongs here. Right alongside immigration policy and trans rights. Because while those are deeply important issues (and they are the attention grabbing topics that have defined this administration’s platform) they are also issues that can be wielded as distractions. The Trump team knows how to flood the zone with outrage, trans bans, mass deportations, unconstitutional executive orders. Meanwhile, the quieter crisis is the unchecked, unregulated power of tech.
It’s not a coincidence that the most powerful companies in the world are also the least regulated. And it’s not a coincidence that we’re all too exhausted, too distracted, too overstimulated to really push back.
We’ve been conditioned to think the biggest threats come with the most shocking headlines. But the real threat is often the one hiding in plain sight, so embedded in our daily lives that we’ve stopped clocking it as dangerous.
I’m not anti-technology. I’m not raising my child in a yurt. I live a deeply online life. But I also think we need to get honest about what’s happening here. Even most of us with fully formed frontal lobes can’t moderate our own screen time.
I haven’t read The Anxious Generation, and I probably won’t. I’ve heard enough interviews with Jonathan Haidt to know I’m mostly aligned. Phones don’t belong in schools, duh. But that should be the bare minimum.
We need structural change. We need regulation. We need policy-level accountability. Because asking individual parents to go up against trillion-dollar tech companies is not only unrealistic, it’s impossible.
We already know the harms. We don’t have to imagine them. Algorithmic content, endless dopamine loops, data harvesting disguised as personalization, this isn’t science fiction. It’s happening now. A handful of unelected men (tech CEOs) are deciding what gets seen, what gets promoted, and what makes money.
So what do we do?
We regulate it.
Not through purity tests or parental controls, we need public policy.
We stop pretending this is just “the way things are.” We stop blaming parents or teachers or kids. And we start demanding action from our elected leaders.
That means pushing for:
Age verification that’s more than a checkbox.
Advertising restrictions for underage users.
Design standards that don’t exploit attention and vulnerability.
Transparency around what’s being collected, tracked, and monetized.
We treat this like every other public health crisis we’ve eventually taken seriously and we bring in infrastructure and laws. And we talk about it more. We can’t afford to let the culture wars over immigration and trans rights drown out this quieter, incredibly dangerous threat.
You can call me a hypocrite. I’m always plugged in. I’m on TikTok. I’m writing this on Substack. I live a deeply online life.
But I’m also a parent and a person who still believes in the idea of a government that protects its people.
And for those of us who love the internet, who’ve built lives and communities here, it may feel like the call is coming from inside the house.
But that doesn’t mean we have to let the house burn to the ground with us inside.
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